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Started reading
February 24, 2019
This is the unsung glory of marriage: No more rich fucking tapestries necessary. Time to garden, read, play guitar, cook, write, hang out with friends, and—perhaps most importantly—watch fifteen hours of reality TV in a row.
You see, the problem with weaving rich fucking tapestries is that it’s like seeing one too many delightful rom-coms about soft-spoken, funny guys who say just the right thing at just the right moment. You start imagining that real-life guys never say clueless shit or smell like gorgonzola cheese. It’s like training yourself, through successive wanking sessions, to only get off on redheads with giant boobs. By filling our heads with Shower Fresh–scented fantasy worlds, we not only start to expect too much but we also become easily bored with the real world and its very real magic.
What I mean is that rich tapestries block out the magic of real moments. Rich tapestries block out real people—love interests, but also other people who matter. Rich tapestries compromise friendships, and they block us from our career goals, and they blot out the sun. They train us to think that the only scene that’s full color in our lives is the scene with the dude in it.
The world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back on this time and say, “I had it all, but I didn’t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.”
And you feel like you need to explain your choices, to react, to do something to make the whole picture clearer and more palatable to other people. But you don’t! You don’t have to explain a goddamn thing—to anyone, ever! All you really need, more than anything else, is the ability to tolerate the fact that some people are going to like you, some people are going to dislike you, some people are going to hate you, and—yes!—some people are going to drop to their knees and say, “SMART, UNPREDICTABLE, SENSITIVE, UNIQUE WOMAN, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?”
As long as you’re conflicted, no one else will be comfortable with you. As much as you might say, “I’m proud of who I am, damn it!” your statements about yourself still sound like marketing copy.
But for guys who could be genuinely interested in you, defensiveness and bravado that conceal larger insecurities add up to a major red flag. These things say, “I may pretend not to care about what you think, but I actually care a lot. I want to explain myself, but I shouldn’t have to explain myself.” You’re wearing a sign that says, “HERE’S WHO I AM, GODDAMN IT. LOVE ME OR SCREW YOU,” and handing out cards that say, “How would you rate me on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means ‘strongly approve’ and 1 means ‘Get out of my face,
the first of many personal attacks on me specifically
And nothing is quite as hard as being a sensitive, aggressive weirdo.
“I’m kind of a strange person and I like what I like, but sometimes it’s hard to be me.”
Practice saying, “I’m opinionated. I’m a weirdo. I’m not for everyone.”
Yes, your first priority should be to keep an open mind, to listen, to observe men with a clear, uncluttered perspective. Your second priority should be to never, ever waste a minute of your time on a guy who’s tepid.
Instead, you can say, “You sound indifferent about this. Maybe we’re not a match. I don’t want to get serious too fast, but I also don’t want to tool around with just anyone. I believe in true love.”
You can be alone for as long as it takes. Can’t you? Isn’t it good to be alive? If it’s not, fix that.
Being nice is worthless if you’re just going to feel resentful about it in the end. You might as well just be outspoken and state your needs from the outset.
Maybe you need to ask yourself, “How secretly furious am I?”
When I finally decided to stop seeming cooler and more easygoing than I actually was, when I finally stopped pretending that nothing bothered me, that I didn’t need to talk about heavy stuff or express my emotions, when I finally stopped seeing tears as a weakness (being utterly unable to cry is a pretty blatant weakness, if you ask me), that’s when I realized that I was trying to truss up my weird in a shiny conventional package. Guys always thought I was a Little Debbie snack cake, but then they’d open the package and find anchovies and feel disappointed. Instead of questioning why I was
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Then I want you to write down at least two things you did that day that you’re proud of. If you didn’t do anything that impressive, just write down something you did that was really just pure YOU. Maybe you made up a song about armpits, or ate two Cronuts in one sitting, or ran four miles and then watched a really stupid episode of CSI: Barcelona. Notice that you get credit for doing the so-called wrong thing,
You’re so good at being GOOD. But how good are you at being YOU? You know what makes a spark? A real human being with a bad attitude who’s tired of moving shit just to sit down in a motherfucker’s apartment.
But you do need to be something. Are you afraid of being something? Because let me tell you the god’s honest truth: A lot of women out there are afraid of being something.
I think you want a project-obsessed boyfriend because you want to have projects of your own. You aren’t writing to me so that I’ll tell you that some man will love you someday. You aren’t writing to me to prove that you’re healthy enough and now you’re ready to be cherished. You’re writing to me because you’re ready to cherish yourself. Like you yourself wrote, YOU SHOULD BE CHERISHED.
You don’t cherish yourself. You do whatever what’s-his-face wants to do, for the sake of the fun little team, for the sake of demonstrating your good communication skills. Just admit it. You never draw lines in the sand. He says, “We need to talk, it’s serious.” And you don’t say, “WHAT do you MEAN motherfucking WHAT?!! TELL ME RIGHT NOW.” You say, “Okay,” and then make an emergency trip to your therapist and discuss all of the possibilities,
WHY ARE!!! HALF YOUR ESSAYS ABOUT ME!!!!!!!!!!!
You want more than that. The lack of spark within you comes from the conflict between WHO YOU TRY TO BE and WHAT YOU REALLY WANT FOR YOURSELF. You want more. You act like you don’t want more, you act like you’re satisfied, but in fact you want a lot more.
I knew I was good at it, but it always came easily to me, so I discounted its importance.
But even though I was a socially paralyzed shut-in, I realize now that my standards were also way too fucking high. No one was smart enough or interesting enough for me.
But as you get a little older, you know who you are, and you don’t mind knowing people who don’t necessarily get you. Knowing people who don’t get you is good for you, actually.
You can’t get a BFF overnight, and you shouldn’t be in the market for that right now anyway. You just need a few people to hang out with every now and then.
Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, “This should be lighter by now,” you’re shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl through the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, “Holy GOD, it’s dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.”
Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is.
